"Average Joe"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

At 9:08 AM -0500 2/19/03, David Jennings wrote:
>In Fisk's article and later in Taibbi's, the anti-anti-war 
>protagonist (in the one case actual, in the other imaginary) is a 
>male, and I'm pretty sure Anglo and Christian.  You know - "Joe". 
>That's the population among the working class that's not being 
>reached, correct?

One question and one observation.

Question:
White male workers are a heterogeneous bunch.  Subdivided by age, 
income, and religion, which series of white male workers are 
"anti-anti-war"?  Evidence?

Observation:
When you belong to an established electoral political party in a 
two-party system and try to win an election, you pay the closest 
attention to "swing voters" -- those still sitting on the fence even 
late in the game, in whose minds such subjective cross-class 
questions as religion often trump objective class interests.  When 
you try to build a social movement on the left, for instance, an 
anti-war movement, you begin with the most committed left-wing 
organizers and activists, and then you try to help about a third of 
your potential constituency (the potential constituency of an 
anti-war movement being all of the multiracial working class + the 
progressive segments, regardless of their classes, of the racially, 
ethnically, nationally, and/or religiously oppressed who are the most 
likely to become "collateral damages" of the war in the civil rights 
& liberties battleground) become firstly politically active and 
secondly move to the left.  In short, in electoral politics, you look 
to the center, and in non-electoral politics, you look to the left. 
"Average Joe's" -- apolitical white male workers -- are less 
important in social movements on the left than in electoral politics.
-- 
Yoshie

* Calendar of Events in Columbus: 
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>